Leading and Motivating Global Teams

Integrating Offshore Centers and the Head Office

Vimal Kumar Khanna

• Publisher: Auerbach Publications
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781498784740
• eBook ISBN: 9781351651691
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Project Management
• Index: Business

This book provides techniques for offshore center managers and head office managers to motivate and manage globally distributed teams, which are spread across the offshore center and the head office, and thereby achieve higher productivity. Readers learn how to integrate the offshore center with the head office to make the offshore team an extension of the head office. While integrating teams with the head office, offshore center managers can still retain independence and authority to meet team aspirations.

The book provides insight into devising new organizational structures to balance the authority and responsibilities of offshore center and head office managers. Head office managers responsible for managing globally distributed projects learn how to achieve a higher success rate on their projects and be better rewarded for their efforts in offshoring. Head office managers also learn techniques to make more significant contributions in their expatriate assignments to the offshore center.

This book guides both the offshore center managers and the head office managers to fully realize the potential of the offshore center, which can result in higher revenues and profitability.

Chapter 1

Introduction

A large number of global companies are running Offshore Centers in distant countries. These companies have augmented their project teams in their global Head Office (HO) with the Offshore Center teams. The projects are distributed across the Offshore Center and HO, with the Offshore Center managers and HO managers leading the project teams to deliver on the project objectives.

Offshore Centers generally have quite strong and capable teams and have the potential to make even more significant contributions to their parent companies. However, Offshore Center teams are facing a number of challenges that are preventing them from delivering to their full potential and, hence, limiting their contribution to their parent companies.

This book describes various challenges being faced by Offshore Centers, deeply analyzes their root causes, and suggests techniques to be applied by the Offshore Center managers and HO managers to address these challenges. The book suggests a holistic approach to address these issues by specifying the actions to be taken by managers at all levels of the organizational hierarchy, ranging from first-level project managers to senior/executive management personnel.

The suggested techniques are supported by numerous Case Studies presented in the book. These Case Studies relate to Offshore Centers of global leading companies of various types and sizes, including large multibillion-dollar global giants, start-ups/small companies, product development companies, services companies, etc. Thus, Offshore Center managers and HO managers belonging to the whole gamut of company types and sizes will benefit from the book.

The suggested techniques will allow Offshore Center managers and HO managers to:

• Hire, retain, train, groom, lead, motivate, and manage Offshore Center teams effectively, to improve their skills, productivity, and growth

• Facilitate offloading of large core, complex, and high-value projects of the company to Offshore Centers

• Allow Offshore Centers to integrate with the HO to ensure success of globally distributed projects but still retain their local work culture, to meet the expectations and aspirations of the Offshore Center employees

• Facilitate growth of Offshore Center employees to global top positions of the company

• Allow the Offshore Center managers to get the requisite freedom and authority over their teams to deliver on their projects effectively

• Allow the HO managers who are heading overall projects, which are distributed across the HO and Offshore Centers, to achieve a higher success rate on their projects

• Allow the HO managers to be better rewarded for their efforts in offloading projects to Offshore Centers and ensuring their success, by better aligning their key result areas (KRAs) with the company’s objective of saving costs by increased offshoring

• Offer new and additional offshoring-related roles and responsibilities to HO managers, to make their roles more critical for the company and to significantly enhance their contributions

• Allow the Offshore Center managers to significantly improve the productivity of their teams by increasing investments in employee hiring, training, and skill building without being severely constrained because of the company’s excessive cost-saving expectations from the Offshore Center

• Allow the Offshore Center managers to get fair representation in company-wide global management committees, to win fair and just treatment for the Offshore Center employees on all matters

• Allow the Offshore Centers to make strategic contributions to their companies, instead of remaining just low-cost implementation centers

• Allow expatriate managers from the HO to the Offshore Centers to develop the requisite knowledge and skills to succeed in meeting the expectations of Offshore Center teams from their expatriate assignments

• Allow the company’s executive management to decide the right role and responsibilities for their Offshore Center head, based on the company’s characteristics and offshoring requirements

• Allow the Offshore Center head to get the requisite authority and control over the Offshore Center team, to lead and manage them effectively to make the Center deliver to its full potential

The Offshore Centers can then rise to the next level and make much more significant contributions to the revenues, cost savings/profits, and growth of their companies. The Offshore Centers can then play a major strategic and critical role for their companies, like the role being played by the HO, rather than being just low-cost implementation centers.

In the coming chapters, the book suggests techniques for the Offshore Center and HO managers to deal with the following challenges faced by Offshore Centers.

1. Global companies have long been outsourcing projects to services companies (vendors) that are not part of the company. Unfortunately, even when the HO management of a company offloads projects to its own Offshore Center, it treats the Offshore Center in a similar fashion as it treats the outsourcing vendors executing projects for it. The HO managers consider the Offshore Center as subordinate to the HO and expect the teams in the Center to simply follow instructions from the HO.

This book shows that Offshore Center teams have a number of unique strengths that teams of outsourcing vendors lack. The book argues that HO managers will fail to capitalize on these strengths if they treat the Offshore Center in the same way as its outsourcing vendors. The book suggests that HO managers capitalize on these strengths by considering their Offshore Center teams as being truly a part of, and an extension to, the HO teams. The company will then be able to derive enhanced results from its Offshore Center teams, resulting in higher success rates of its projects.

2. Even if HO managers consider the Offshore Center to be part of the HO for most purposes, it is still a stark reality that a large number of Offshore Center projects are generally mere extensions to HO projects. The overall authority over these projects resides with the HO managers. The HO managers assume that the offshore project modules may not succeed if they do not have tight control over them, and hence, exert their direct authority over the Offshore Center project teams. The Offshore Center managers then end up handling huge project responsibilities without the requisite authority and freedom, which significantly constrains their ability to hire, retain, lead, motivate, and manage talent to deliver effectively on their project deliverables.

This book suggests techniques that will give sufficient independence and decision-making authority to the Offshore Center managers to allow them to extract the best results from their teams. Thus, the quality and timeliness of project deliverables, and the productivity and morale of the Offshore Center teams, will improve considerably.

However, it should be noted that giving more authority and responsibilities to Offshore Center managers may possibly dilute the authority and responsibilities of the HO managers. This book addresses these concerns of HO managers by proposing new additional offshoring-related roles and responsibilities for these managers. The HO managers will then be playing a more critical role for the company, and will make much more significant contributions to the company compared to their current role. Further, the book suggests techniques to better align the KRAs of the HO managers with the company’s objective of saving costs by increased offshoring, to allow the HO managers to be better rewarded for their performance in offloading projects to the Offshore Center and ensuring their success.

3. The work culture, management practices, employee sensitivities, career growth expectations, and employee designations/roles in the country of the Offshore Center can be quite different from those in the country of the HO. HO managers sometimes do not appreciate these nuances, and in their efforts to integrate the Offshore Center with the HO, impose HO norms on the Offshore Center teams, leading to employee displeasure, demotivation, and loss of productivity.

This book elaborates the benefits of retaining the local norms in the Offshore Center and suggests techniques that will allow the Offshore Center to integrate with the HO but still retain its local work culture. The techniques will help meet the expectations and aspirations of the Offshore Center employees, which will motivate them to perform to their full potential.

4. Offshore Centers have many senior and highly capable managers and technical personnel. These professionals deserve to reach top management and top technical positions in the overall global company hierarchy. If they are in these top positions, they can help the company choose the right strategies for future revenue growth, visualize new potentially highly successful products, etc. Unfortunately, these Offshore Center senior professionals often do not get opportunities to grow to global top positions because of the constraint of their not being based in the HO. Instead, comparatively less capable HO personnel rise to global top positions purely on the basis of their location. Thus, although more capable and deserving professionals exist in the company, leaders are unable to fully utilize their potential, resulting in loss in revenues and profits for the company.

This book suggests techniques that will allow the growth of deserving senior and capable Offshore Center employees to key global top positions based purely on their merit, and not constrained by their location. The global top management and technical positions will then be filled only by the most capable and deserving professionals in the company, who can then make the right strategic decisions to significantly increase the revenues and profits of the company.

5. In many companies, the Offshore Center management is not sufficiently represented in the company’s global management committees that make decisions on overall company policies, management practices, employee appraisal norms, employee benefits, distribution of projects among various locations, resolution of interlocation contention among employees, selection of employees for global top positions, etc. The decisions made by such committees are then not in the best interest of the Offshore Center and its employees. The Offshore Center then fails to win a large number of projects, which limits the Center’s growth and contribution to the company’s revenues and cost savings. Further, Offshore Center employees fail to win decisions in their interest from these committees, resulting in employee demoralization and loss of productivity. The Offshore Center teams are then unable to add value to the company up to their full potential.

This book highlights the problems that can occur because of lack of Offshore Center representation in these company-wide committees. The book suggests the right composition of these committees, with fair representation of the Offshore Center management. The Offshore Center managers on these committees can then sell the strengths of their teams to convince the company to offload large projects to the Center. They can also effectively raise the requirements and concerns of the Offshore Center employees in these committees to win the right decisions for them, in terms of getting favorable employee policies, benefits, career growth norms, and fair resolution of interlocation employee contentions.

6. HO management generally assumes that Offshore Center teams are not capable enough to deliver on large and complex projects. The Offshore Center is then typically given basic and peripheral activities, such as executing simple projects; basic features and additions to core products; maintenance of existing projects; etc. The Offshore Center is then adding a large number of employees to the company but is not working on new core products/projects, which might add huge revenues to the company compared to the low-revenue-generating peripheral projects usually being executed in the Center.

Further, since the Offshore Center does not offer opportunities to work on challenging projects, it is unable to hire, retain, and motivate talent, especially capable and experienced professionals. The Offshore Center teams then consist of inexperienced and mediocre professionals, who may fail to deliver even on the simple projects assigned to them.

This book debunks the myth that Offshore Centers are not capable of delivering on large and complex projects. The book suggests techniques by which the Offshore Center management can convince the company to offload to them high-revenue-generating core, complex, and large projects. Thus, the full potential of Offshore Center teams is realized, leading to the Center making much greater contributions to the company’s revenues.

7. Offshore Centers are established to achieve cost savings for the company, by offshoring projects to low-cost Offshore Center locations in countries that have lower salary costs and lower operating costs compared to the HO. However, many companies over-insist on the cost-saving factor, leading to inefficiencies in project delivery from the Offshore Centers. The excess pressures to control costs result in multiple problems in the Offshore Center—for example, the inability to hire capable employees since their salary expectations cannot be met; cutting down the investment in training and skill development of employees; and severely limiting the resources required to deliver results to the full potential of the employees. Thus, the output of the Offshore Center is reduced, resulting in an overall loss of revenues and profits of the company.

This book suggests techniques for balancing the Offshore Center cost-saving requirements with the need to increase investment in the Center, for it to build its capacity to deliver to its full potential. The techniques will result in much higher revenues and cost savings for the company in the long run, which will more than offset the additional cost incurred in the Offshore Center in capacity building.

8. Offshore Centers recognize the contributions of their high-performing employees by instituting local awards in the Center. The employee delivering the best performance among all the Offshore Center employees is publically recognized and awarded. The purpose of such awards is to motivate the employees to perform beyond their potential to achieve such recognition. However, since the employees compete only with their peer Offshore Center employees, the competition to win the awards may not be that hard for high-performing employees. Such a competition does not force the employees to significantly improve their performance to win the awards, and the overall improvement in the productivity of the Offshore Center employees remains low.

Since a large number of projects within the Offshore Center are extensions to the core projects being executed in the HO, employees in both locations are working on similar projects. This book suggests that companies capitalize on this fact by instituting global awards, where Offshore Center employees compete with the HO employees to win the awards. The HO will usually have a number of high performers who are working on core and complex projects of the company. Thus, Offshore Center employees now have to compete not only with a larger population of employees, they are now up against many high performers who are excelling on core projects. The Offshore Center employees then have to stretch themselves much beyond their potential to win the awards, leading to much higher improvement in overall productivity in the Offshore Center.

9. An interesting area of debate over the past many years has been on the role to be played by the Offshore Center head. At one extreme, we have companies that are fully capitalizing on the strengths of their Offshore Center heads by giving them complete responsibility, authority, and control over the Offshore Center teams and projects. At the other extreme, we have companies that are running their Offshore Centers without a local head, with all the Offshore Center teams reporting directly to HO management. Companies need to judiciously decide the role, authority, and responsibilities of the Offshore Center head position to be able to derive the best results from the Offshore Centers.

Since each company has its unique characteristics and offshoring requirements, this book suggests that companies define the role and responsibilities of the Offshore Center head based on multiple factors, including the type and size of the company, the size of the Offshore Center and its growth plans, the company’s senior management’s knowledge about running a company in the country of the Offshore Center, the nature of projects to be offshored, ranging from totally independent projects to plain extensions of HO projects, etc. The book then elaborates the complete set of functions to be performed by the Offshore Center head based on these factors. The Offshore Center head can then lead, motivate, and manage the Offshore Center team successfully to ensure the success of the projects/activities in the Center, and thus to significantly increase the Center’s contributions to the company.

10. HO managers...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Be “Truly Global” in Outlook and Character
• Chapter 3 Authority and Freedom to Offshore Center Management
• Chapter 4 Integrate Offshore Center with Head Office but Retain Local Work Culture
• Chapter 5 Career Growth for Offshore Center Employees to Global Top Positions
• Chapter 6 Fair Representation of Offshore Center Management in Global Committees
• Chapter 7 Look Beyond Offshoring Only Peripheral Projects
• Chapter 8 Avoid Over-Insistence on the Cost-Reduction Purpose of the Offshore Center
• Chapter 9 Unified Awards across the Offshore Center and the Head Office
• Chapter 10 Roles and Responsibilities of the Offshore Center Head
• Chapter 11 Being an Expatriate Manager from the Head Office to the Offshore Center
• Chapter 12 Using the Offshore Center to Make Strategic Contributions to the Company
• Appendix: Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Index